Business management methods in social action programs;

Page 1

Business Management Methods
in Social Action Programs
by Sanford S. Ackerman
Introduction
We taxpayers are going to invest well over a billion
dollars in social action programs during the next year in
an attempt to bring about great changes in our society.
These programs will range from the continuing redevel­opment
and conservation of our cities to the new war on
poverty in such forms as job-training, community action
centers for social services, and remedial education classes.
Additional millions of dollars of our money will be spent
on highway construction and mass transit development.
The resulting changes in transportation patterns could
easily alter our society as greatly as the post-war shift to
the suburbs, which can probably be attributed to our pre­vious
investments in F H A mortgage insurance, and the
roads which now give us somewhat sluggish access to
them. In a broad sense then, transportation, urban renew­al,
and poverty programs are all social action programs.
Whether we are, by analogy, minority or majority
stockholders in the vast enterprise which will manage
these social action programs, we should certainly be
interested in how the programs will be managed, and
whether we are likely to get some worthwhile return on
our investment.
An analogy between business enterprise and the com­munity
renewal, poverty, and transportation programs is
quite appropriate, because unlike welfare and unemploy­ment
insurance programs which are penalty costs we pay
for the minor inefficiencies of democratic government and
free enterprise, these new programs represent a kind of
capital investment in the productive capacity of the
gigantic enterprise called the United States. The trans­portation
system is — or should be — one of the efficient
integral parts of the enterprise. All the people who live
here either contribute to the success of the enterprise, by
virtue of their acquired abilities and skills, or retard its
growth by becoming a cost to it when they are not
equipped to live and work in our competitive society. We
certainly must not lose our compassion as men, nor should
we lose sight of our collective responsibility for the de­prived
and underprivileged members of our community,
but, regardless of the moral, philosophical, and political
justifications which led to it, a decision has been made
to spend large sums of money. This money will be spent
on programs which have never been tried before, to ac­complish
results which have eluded man since free enter­prise
was tempered by social conscience.
This is a discussion of how business management meth­ods
are being used, and how they should be used to insure
the best possible results in social action programs. I offer
no apologies for using the language of business manage­ment
to discuss the management of social action pro­grams,
but it does not mean that I have lost sight of social
and humanitarian considerations. It is probably time to
abandon the equally worn shibboleths which hold that
businessmen and engineers are insensible to the needs of
people, and that social scientists and city planners live in
a dream world untouched by fiscal responsibility.
The Elements of Effective Management
The management functions in any enterprise are plan­ning
and control. The support of these functions requires
the collection and storage of data necessary for measure-
2 T H E Q U A R T E R L Y